To thine own self be true

Hot Cross Buns to kick off April.

(My songs all start as poems, then become song lyrics. This one was first performed for a 1980s ELAC conference with co-author Glen Kirkland, and two women teacher-poets from Calgary Janeen Werner-King and Faye Reineberg-Holt. Definitely a Roger Whittaker influence here.)

In town this weekend, a deaf drama festival with sign interpreters on stage and even acting. There are even signers in French!
Well-done, I say, and long overdue for a significant population long within our midst.

Ivermectin does not prevent Covid or keep people out of hospitals finally convince the dumbest-ass groups out there that consuming horse dewormer is not a miracle cure?

Never underestimate the steadfastness of human stupidity and ignorant orneriness.

Which quickly leads to competitions in schools and communities. One upmanship. Top dog-underdog. And so bullying and cheating get built in very early on. Aggressiveness-assertiveness into adulthood. Which leads to sanctioned team sports and competitions. And struggles between groups and areas and nations, finally. Leading to wars. And discrimination and prejudice on a large scale. Pretty much everywhere you look. In Ukraine. Even in the Oscars fight event with Chris Rock.

“Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

“There is a coherence in things, a stability; something…is immune from change, and shines out…in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby…Of such moments…the thing is made that remains for ever after.”

(Reliving our Basement Rock days back in the early ’80s while recording in Wayne’s basement studio, Calgary. Note his vintage Ludwig drums. Wayne became Mr. Computer Guy for the City of Calgary.)

(1966-67/grades 11-12 Silver Heights Collegiate lads reunited in summer 2019 A.D. in Calgary. Old (musical) friends. Music is thicker than time passing, methinks.)

out here in Alberta is that that the Conservatives and UCP have already slashed the AB grid way back which is why we’ve been having more outages the last few years.

What will happen will be more outages in more places, especially in winter. I don’t know about others, but the prospect of a net zero grid while people freeze their asses does not sound like a sane, practical, sustained solution affecting the greatest number of Canadians. If anything, AB electric grids need to be increased and/or updated with longer, colder winters and increased population.

I imagine a cartoon with Trudeau as a self-congratulatory climate saviour on one side and frozen Westerners and folks up north on the other side asking for the lights and heat to be turned back on in the dead of winter so they can physically survive. Much as I support climate efforts, a quick-fix net zero electric grid just sounds, to me, like a major disaster waiting to happen in real-time.

(Chris Harman, my singing partner in high school and university, 1966-1970. Chris, second from right sang harmony. For the last 3-4 decades, he has been working as a prominent, well-respected women’s doctor in Baltimore, home of Edgar Allan Poe.)